Pharisees
[3] He claims that Pharisee influence over the common people was so great that anything they said against the king or the high priest was believed,[4] apparently in contrast to the more elite Sadducees, who were the upper class.
"[16] The first historical mention of the Pharisees and their beliefs comes in the four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, in which both their meticulous adherence to their interpretation of the Torah as well as their eschatological views are described.
A later historical mention of the Pharisees comes from the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus in a description of the "four schools of thought", or "four sects", into which he divides the Jews in the 1st century CE.
Although the Hasmoneans were considered heroes for resisting the Seleucids, their reign lacked the legitimacy conferred by descent from the Davidic dynasty of the First Temple era.
[citation needed] Josephus indicates that the Pharisees received the backing and good-will of the common people,[30] apparently in contrast to the more elite Sadducees associated with the ruling classes.
(A mamzer—literally bastard according to the Pharisaic definition—is an outcast child born of a forbidden relationship, such as adultery or incest, in which marriage of the parents could not lawfully occur.
Although the Pharisees did not support the wars of expansion of the Hasmoneans and the forced conversions of the Idumeans, the political rift between them became wider when a Pharisee named Eleazar insulted the Hasmonean ethnarch John Hyrcanus at his own table, suggesting that he should abandon his role as High Priest due to a rumour (probably untrue) that he had been conceived while his mother was a prisoner of war.
[35][36] After the death of John Hyrcanus, his younger son Alexander Jannaeus made himself king and openly sided with the Sadducees by adopting their rites in the Temple.
Josephus attests that Salome was favorably inclined toward the Pharisees, and their political influence grew tremendously under her reign, especially in the Sanhedrin or Jewish Council, which they came to dominate.
[39] Later texts like the Mishnah and the Talmud record a host of rulings by rabbis, some of whom are believed to be from among the Pharisees, concerning sacrifices and other ritual practices in the Temple, torts, criminal law, and governance.
[citation needed] According to Josephus, the Pharisees appeared before Pompey asking him to interfere and restore the old priesthood while abolishing the royalty of the Hasmoneans altogether.
In Rome, Herod sought the support of Mark Antony and Octavian, and secured recognition by the Roman Senate as king, confirming the termination of the Hasmonean dynasty.
Their vision of Jewish law as a means by which ordinary people could engage with the sacred in their daily lives was a position meaningful to the majority of Jews.
"[citation needed]Following the destruction of the Temple, Rome governed Judea through a procurator at Caesarea and a Jewish patriarch and levied the Fiscus Judaicus.
During this period rabbis finalized the canonization of the Tanakh, and in 200 Judah haNasi edited together Tannaitic judgements and traditions into the Mishnah, considered by the rabbis to be the definitive expression of the Oral Torah (although some of the sages mentioned in the Mishnah are Pharisees who lived prior to the destruction of the Second Temple, or prior to the Bar Kozeba revolt, most of the sages mentioned lived after the revolt).
The second period is that of the Amoraim (from the Aramaic word for "speaker") rabbis and their students who continued to debate legal matters and discuss the meaning of the books of the Bible.
According to Jacob Neusner: The "Judaism" of the rabbis at this time is in no degree either normal or normative, and speaking descriptively, the schools cannot be called "elite."
Whatever their aspirations for the future and pretensions in the present, the rabbis, though powerful and influential, constitute a minority group seeking to exercise authority without much governmental support, to dominate without substantial means of coercion.
The Pharisaic attitude is perhaps[citation needed] best exemplified by a story about the sages Hillel the Elder and Shammai, who both lived in the latter half of the 1st century BCE.
[56][57] Fundamentally, the Pharisees continued a form of Judaism that extended beyond the Temple, applying Jewish law to mundane activities in order to sanctify the everyday world.
This was a more participatory (or "democratic") form of Judaism, in which rituals were not monopolized by an inherited priesthood but rather could be performed by all adult Jews individually or collectively, whose leaders were not determined by birth but by scholarly achievement.
[61] To Rosemary Ruether, the Pharisaic proclamation of the Oral Torah was their way of freeing Judaism from the clutches of Aaronite priesthood, represented by the Sadducees.
[citation needed] As Neusner explains, the schools of the Pharisees and rabbis were and are holy: "...because there men achieve sainthood through study of Torah and imitation of the conduct of the masters.
[49]: 8 The commitment to relate religion to daily life through the law has led some (notably, Saint Paul and Martin Luther) to infer that the Pharisees were more legalistic than other sects in the Second Temple Era.
[65] The Mishna in the beginning of Avot and (in more detail) Maimonides in his Introduction to Mishneh Torah records a chain of tradition (mesorah) from Moses at Mount Sinai down to R' Ashi, redactor of the Talmud and last of the Amoraim.
This chain of tradition includes the interpretation of unclear statements in the Bible (e.g. that the "fruit of a beautiful tree" refers to a citron as opposed to any other fruit), the methods of textual exegesis (the disagreements recorded in the Mishna and Talmud generally focus on methods of exegesis), and Laws with Mosaic authority that cannot be derived from the Biblical text (these include measurements (e.g. what amount of a non-kosher food must one eat to be liable), the amount and order of the scrolls to be placed in the phylacteries, etc.).
It was some members of his group who argued that gentile converts must be circumcised and obliged to follow the Mosaic law, leading to a dispute within the early Church addressed at the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem[70] in 50 CE.
[74] Examples of passages include the story of Jesus declaring the sins of a paralytic man forgiven and the Pharisees calling the action blasphemy.
[77] However, according to E. P. Sanders, Jesus' actions are actually similar to and consistent with Jewish beliefs and practices of the time, as recorded by the rabbis, that commonly associate illness with sin and healing with forgiveness.
[81] Paula Frederiksen and Michael J. Cook believe that those passages of the New Testament that are seemingly most hostile to the Pharisees were written sometime after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.
